Ecommerce marketing is the process of promoting revenue and sales by raising awareness about an online store’s brand and product offerings. Digital marketing in Nigeria for ecommerce applies traditional marketing principles to a multichannel, data-driven environment.
Ecommerce marketing in Nigeria can be divided into two general actions: driving website traffic and creating the ultimate customer experience for conversion. Both are critical components to growing an online business, failure in one is all but sure to undermine any success in the other. Experienced marketers can thrive in a digital landscape, starting with a solid foundation of common terms.
Ecommerce Marketing Channels
- Affiliate Marketing: Referrals from other websites with industry or product-focused content such as reviews, comparisons, and testimonials. Successful affiliates have a loyal following or receive traffic from some of the above channels. They typically receive a set commission of referred sales, often determined on a case-by-case basis.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): It’s used on search marketing for bidding on search terms. Sometimes used a synonym for PPC, referring to paid advertising campaigns. SEM is often used to describe efforts on Google’s AdWords platform and paid platforms on other search engines, such as Bing.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Unlike the paid media opportunities described above, SEO traffic comes from unpaid “organic” results on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Successful SEO requires adherence to best practices on a product page level in tandem with content creation, inbound links, social media engagement, and many other factors that search engine algorithms take into consideration.
- Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): Effective PPC campaigns drive users with intent to purchase, making it more efficient than many traditional advertising platforms. Businesses bid on impressions for paid listings at the top of search engine results, paying on a per-click basis. Impressions are determined by user search query, with strategy revolving around which keyword bids yield the highest ROI.
- Display Advertising: Banners, sidebars and other predominantly-visual advertisements that appear on other websites. Display ads are facilitated by ad networks such as Google Display Network.
- Email Marketing: Newsletters, abandoned cart notifications and remarketing all use email to target past and potential customers.
